Gone Fishing

The chef who catches your dinner.

A poll that I recently conducted among several of David Pasternack’s friends and colleagues yielded a nearly unanimous result. The question was: if Dave were a fish, what kind would he be? The answer was: a tuna. One respondent, Artie Hoernig, a commercial fisherman who also operates a retail fish market and restaurant in Island Park, New York, was more specific. “Absolutely a bluefin tuna,” he said, referring to a species that I’d heard Pasternack characterize as “like a freight train swimming in the ocean.” A minority opinion from his father, Mel (“striped bass—wild, big, good fighter”), dovetailed with Dave’s own measured self-appraisal: “Half tuna, half striper, I guess. Tuna for the thrill of the chase, the hunt. I love to catch a tuna. And striped bass is the king of the fish inshore. It’s our native fish, and I grew up catching ’em, you know.” He went on, “Basically, I’ve fished my whole life. I started fishing with my father when I was about five, in Jamaica Bay, off of Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn. Snapper, bluefish, blowfish, flounder. I fished regularly with a guy named Captain Lou. I always fished with older guys. It was, like, somebody would introduce me and they’d take me under their wing. People don’t necessarily do that anymore, which is too bad, because that’s how you learn—‘You’re tying it that way? No, you tie it that way.’ If you wanna catch a lot of fish, you’ve gotta take an aggressive approach. And what’s the point of fishing if you don’t wanna catch ’em?”

Pasternack is the chef and co-creator of Esca, a five-year-old fish restaurant on West Forty-third Street, in Manhattan. His recipes are unaffectedly refined, and he defines his culinary creativity in elliptical, prosaic terms: “It’s passion, plus knowing when something needs a little something”—the emblem of a cook, or, for that matter, any artist who knows what to put in and what to leave out. A focussed, sensible fellow, he understands the fish business better than just about anyone, in ways intuitive, visceral, and pragmatic. Before dawn one spring morning at the Fulton Fish Market, as we were admiring a machete-wielding Ecuadorean who, with the celerity of a Jedi, was quartering and trimming a mattress-sized yellowfin tuna, Pasternack noticed a neatly pressed silver-haired gent standing nearby. He said to me softly, “A good old-fashioned ‘made’ guy. Nice guy. But he’s notorious. The market was run by ’em for years, until they passed the RICO laws and then these guys were supposed to be banned. I’m surprised to see him here, even though he owns the business. And if you print the name of the business I’ll have no glass left in my windows.”

Local climate and geography have surprisingly little bearing upon the experience of eating in New York. The foods most closely identified with the city at street level—pizza, pastrami, pretzel, dim sum, falafel—all made their way here on immigrant tides. And the past decade has witnessed an exoticism that often seems more than a little forced. When a phenomenon like Jean-Georges Vongerichten creates an empire in Manhattan, his ambition—which presumes, of course, that a critical mass of people will ante up the equivalent of a mortgage payment for a meal—reflects a high-wire determination to move far beyond his Alsatian roots. (French-Thai fusion! Malay-Thai street food!) Pasternack happens to be Jewish and Esca happens to be resolutely Italian (if unlike any other Italian restaurant in the city). Whatever. Compared with New York’s other celebrated chefs, he has stayed unusually close to home; Esca is, among other things, the direct consequence of his years of experience with a rod and reel. Pasternack lives in Long Beach and, for a while, had a habit of schlepping to Esca, on the Long Island Rail Road, plastic garbage bags containing fish that he’d caught the previous day. “But I’d be exhausted by the time I made the walk from Penn Station,” he said. So he persuaded his wife, Donna Peltz, to make deliveries in their 1988 Toyota sedan, which she did until two years ago, when he decided that he could justify investing in a truck. No other restaurant in the city—not now and presumably not ever—offers year-round wild game that has been personally bagged by the chef.

Before Esca (“bait,” in Italian), Pasternack worked for two decades in a succession of mostly French-themed New York restaurants, bistros, and brasseries, and before that he attended culinary school at Johnson & Wales, in Providence, Rhode Island. During his year and a half in Providence, he drove every weekend to his home town, Rockville Centre, a Nassau County suburb only a few miles inland (or only a madeleine-like sea breeze) from the South Shore of Long Island. Then, after he found work and began living in Manhattan, he stayed connected to the old neighborhood by renting a room or an apartment close to the beach. As often as he could manage, he spent his days off fishing, in the bays and inlets and in the wide-open Atlantic, from the Rockaways to Montauk Point. He took stripers, tuna, flounder, fluke, sea bass, porgies, cod, weakfish, bluefish, mackerel, the inadvertent shark—in his concise inventory, “whatever swam.” Though there’s no mistaking Pasternack for a literary type, spending time with him got me thinking about the way a chef’s evolution can mirror that of a novelist. In the same way that a fiction writer can rely upon the dictum “write about what you know,” Pasternack, as much as a New York-born-and-bred chef can, has thrived by cooking best what he knows best.

In the differentiation between executive chefs, celebrity chefs, and working chefs, Pasternack is plainly in his element in the third category. He doesn’t have a cell phone or respond to e-mail, but he’s easy to get hold of. His office, in effect, is the same spot in the kitchen where he cuts fish, orders supplies, conceives menus, plates food, and supervises his staff. He’s at Esca five, sometimes six days a week, typically from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Though he rents a pied-à-terre on the East Side, most nights he takes the train home to Long Beach, where he and Donna live with their year-old daughter, Ruby, in a red brick and rose stucco bungalow with a detached garage. My first glimpse inside the garage was a moment of recognition: suspended from the rafters were two punching bags. Days when Pasternack is neither working nor fishing, he likes to ride his bicycle along the Long Beach boardwalk—it extends nearly two and a half miles—and then spend a half hour thumping the heavy bags. On or off the job, whether he’s giving instructions in Spanglish to a fish cleaner (“Antonio, you’re gonna take this abajo and this abajo and you’re gonna keep ’em separado, O.K.?”) or butchering a side of veal or setting the hook in a fish that’s on the line, he has the authority of a nimble middleweight, at once firmly grounded and light on his feet. He’s five nine, with powerful arms and shoulders and a creeping waistline. At forty-one, he looks his age. He has short light-brown hair that’s receding and thinning at the crown, a nose you notice, broad cheeks, a strong jaw, blue-gray eyes, and often a slightly weary demeanor. His smile is wry and asymmetrical, listing toward starboard. About every third day, he’s clean-shaven.

The kitchen at Esca is relatively small—two levels, six hundred square feet in all—but for the twenty or so prep cooks, line cooks, runners, and dishwashers who circulate during peak hours, it probably feels less crowded than others they’ve worked in, because the boss isn’t inclined toward histrionics or harangues. He speaks in a low, even register, with an inflection and delivery that are pure South Shore, which is basically blue-collar Brooklynese that’s moved farther out on Long Island. “St. Francis said you have to speak in the vernacular, and that’s Dave,” Mel Pasternack, a semi-retired trial attorney, told me. “When he talks to a fishmonger, he speaks fishspeak.”

“The fish business is very complicated, very complicated,” Dave says when the conversation turns to catch limits, size limits, quotas for different species in different jurisdictions, and the vagaries of a marketplace in which the law of supply and demand regularly conflicts with conservation laws that often strike commercial fishermen as impractical and convoluted. In general, his sympathies lie with the fishermen. Which is to say that Pasternack is a resourceful guy who has cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with certain other guys: “My striped-bass guy called this morning. . . . I was talking to a guy who just came back from Florida. He was snook fishing every day. . . . Whenever Mike goes cod fishing, I’m his guy. . . . The way they ship stuff now is pretty amazing. Here, try this opah. It’s also called moonfish. Fatty, right? A lot of natural fat to it. Kinda has that tuna texture? With a completely different flavor. Very buttery, almost swordfishy. Opah comes from somewhere in the Pacific. I can speak to a guy, he’ll call me at eleven or twelve o’clock, the fish’ll be here when I get here the next morning. . . . A lot about buying fish is spontaneity. A guy called me yesterday and told me what he had and what he recommended. You’d have to be an idiot to buy what he didn’t recommend. I talked to a guy this morning, he was unloading a boat of monkfish. I bought some of the monkfish livers from him, to make pâté. He also had big jumbo scallops. And I bought a box of blackfish from him. . . . I called my crab guy last week. To find out when he’s gonna have blue claws and softshells. He told me to call him back in a month. I call guys all the time.”

The great majority of restaurants in the city, from cozy to corporate, buy all their fish through a single supplier. Pasternack deals with at least fifty: brokers; wholesalers; gill-netters; dredgers; and pinhook, or rod-and-reel, anglers. On any given day, salmon might arrive from Alaska; abalone and black cod from British Columbia; giant clams from Puget Sound; mahogany clams, sea urchins, and diver scallops from Maine; spot prawns from Santa Barbara; pink snapper and John Dory from New Zealand; yellowtail from Japan or California; red snapper, pompano, mahi-mahi, and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico; sardines from Portugal or California; scorpionfish, branzino, orata, and calamari from the Mediterranean; red mullet from Senegal; Arctic char from Iceland; octopus from South Carolina, Portugal, or Thailand; halibut, hake, skate, monkfish, fluke, flounder, kingfish, weakfish, sea bass, striped bass, scallops, sole, and tuna from up and down the East Coast; oysters from Long Island, Rhode Island, Maine, the Canadian Maritimes. Almost all of it is wild, and none of it has ever been frozen, nor will it be. (The freezer at Esca, no larger than a domestic fridge, is reserved for pasta and desserts.) The fish travel by truck, express mail, air freight, courier, U.P.S. Some arrive at the kitchen still flopping.

Pasternack speaks almost daily with Rod Mitchell, the owner of Browne Trading Company, in Portland, Maine, where hundreds of boats a month unload at the Portland Fish Exchange, the largest display fish auction in the country. Mitchell, who has been described as the “fish purveyor to the stars” but prefers to call himself a “fish picker,” combines his talent for scrutinizing individual fish with a global overview of the seafood trade, and he regards Pasternack as an ideal customer. “Dave’s quest is to have as many different kinds of fish as he can and still be able to sell them all,” he told me. “He wants to know every kind of fish that he can get his hands on. If I mention something he hasn’t heard of before, he says, ‘Send it.’ He can get something new and taste it raw, and he knows exactly what to do with it. I’m about to send him a new fish from Brazil, pintado. It’s also called a tigerfish. Amazing-looking. It makes you imagine that it could walk. It has no scales, and its skin is colored like a tiger’s. It’s never been imported tothe United States before. It’s a fish we found at a seafood exposition in Brussels. The minute I saw it, I thought of Dave.”

Every weekday, Pasternack dispatches a buyer, Roberto Nuñez, and a driver (“Tony, the truck guy”) to the Fulton Fish Market. About once a week, he shows up at the Fulton market for the pre-dawn rounds (a ritual that, lamentably, will soon be drained of its echt-Manhattan flavor, when the market relocates to Hunts Point, in the Bronx). Pasternack moves briskly from stall to stall, with an open mind and the confidence that if he doesn’t see what he likes (“Some weeks the market’s good, some weeks it has shit”) he’ll find something else somewhere else that will excite him. Certain dishes appear on the Esca menu three hundred and sixty-three days a year: Sicilian fish stew, Amalfitano fish soup, linguine with mahogany clams, spaghetti with a whole lobster, squid-ink pasta with cuttlefish, fritto misto, marinated anchovies and sardines, grilled octopus. But the guiding principle is that everything is provisional—dependent upon the quality of the available ingredients and upon Pasternack’s sensibility (“There is no system; it’s more about mood”)—and that, of course, there are always plenty more fish in the sea.

Invariably, when I’ve dropped by Esca to see Pasternack, I’ve found him just inside the open doorway of the kitchen, on the ground-floor level, armed with a very sharp knife. The first fish I watched him perform surgery on was a forty-pound halibut that had recently been swimming in the vicinity of Portland. His workstation—situated to afford an unobstructed view of the line cooks and prep cooks at the grill, sauté, and pasta stations, and to allow him to inspect every dish before it leaves the kitchen—is two and a half feet deep and nine feet wide, sufficient to accommodate the occasional four-hundred-pound tuna. His knife was German, with a twelve-inch blade, one of a dozen of varying sizes that he keeps in a plastic tray within easy reach. “I sharpen my knives every Saturday,” he said. “Nobody touches my knives. Not even my wife. They’re sacred.”

Downstairs, the halibut had already been scaled, gutted, and shorn of its dorsal and pelvic fins. It took Pasternack about a minute to remove the first fillet, drawing the knife handle toward him in sure, even strokes, with his left hand, as he proceeded along the spine. He lifted and flipped the fish, reinserted the knife laterally, just behind the pectoral fin, cut to the caudal fin, and severed the second fillet. He separated the flesh from the skin of both fillets as cleanly and economically as if he were peeling apples. The carcass was headed for the soup kettle, but not quite yet. “The head’s gonna be my lunch,” he said as he harvested two plum-sized lumps of cheek meat. Then he began trimming the fillets. “Pretty nice halibut,” he said. “This time of year they can be on the spawn. The meat can be a little milky.” Not in this instance, however. From each fillet he cut out the bloodline, a dark-meat layer that extends lengthwise below the dorsal fin, and sectioned the collar into strips for fritto misto. “You know, this is a fish that you’re paying six and a half dollars a pound for. You’re gonna lose at least thirty-five or forty per cent. So you’ve got to utilize the whole animal. That’s where your knife really makes all the difference.” The halibut’s primary destiny was to be carved into seven-ounce serving portions, poached, and accompanied by smashed fava beans from Pennsylvania and a vinaigrette made with ramps from upstate New York. Twenty-seven dollars, à la carte.

Esca has seating for sixty—a hundred and ten in pleasant weather, when an outdoor patio is opened—and on a normal day each table fills four times. Pasternack fillets and slices fish throughout the morning and during lunch, breaks for a couple of hours in midafternoon, and then resumes until seven o’clock. He multitasks in a self-assured manner—announces orders to the line cooks; talks on the phone; consults with the front-of-the-house managers, nodding when he hears that there’s someone in the dining room whom he should meet and greet; gives instructions to the kitchen runners, who shuttle one aluminum tray after another laden with freshly gutted fish—all the while wielding knives with the same rhythmic, delicate precision. How often does he cut himself? “Only when somebody asks me that question. No, actually, not that much. But I’m due.” A wall phone with an extra-long cord rings at all hours, and Pasternack usually answers it himself, always with the same greeting: “Kitchen.”

Between the moment he first looks at a fish and the moment he finishes filleting it, he often changes his mind about what he’s going to do with it. If it’s perfectly fresh yet doesn’t look perfect (it hasn’t been bled properly;it’s bruised; it was caught in a net and drowned and the flesh is now too opaque; spawning season is under way and the texture seems a bit flabby or “funky”), it won’t be right for the house specialty, crudo—sashimi-sized slices of raw fish that have been accented with sea salt, olive oil, and lemon juice, or with other condiments. But it would still be fine grilled or pan-seared or sautéed. I once asked him to try to articulate the process of creating a new dish. What, precisely, is he thinking when he combines raw fluke with sea beans, radish, and salt? Geoduck (a.k.a. giant clam crudo) with sugar-baby watermelon or artichoke? “I don’t know, man,” he replied. “It’s a very hard question to answer. I think it’s more experience than anything else. Experience dictates that you understand certain things about certain ingredients at certain times of year. You look in the fridge and you have to be able to work with what you have, in season. But it can’t be arbitrary. That’s the problem with a lot of these young cooks. They don’t yet get the idea of how flavors can work, how you have to take into consideration acidity, texture, the properties of various oils. They think they’re being creative but they’re pushing the envelope too much. People like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, what makes them so good is that their food is creative but they know the boundaries.”

I suppose it’s odd to say that I’ve been struck by Pasternack’s empathy for fish, given his recurring role in their demise, but he nevertheless seems intent upon doing honor to the deceased, characteristically by doing no more than necessary to evoke essential flavors and unembellished subtleties. Not that he’s unwilling to call a fish a fish. One day, as I watched him reduce an eight-pound mahi-mahi to about thirty bites of crudo, he showed me its pearly, iridescent pale-pink flesh and said, “You don’t always see it this color. Sometimes the meat’s a little grayer.” On the other hand, mahi-mahi is “a very stupid fish. You catch one and you leave him in the water and all the others’ll follow and you can catch ’em all. Not very smart. Good eating, though.”

Next, he went to work on a Pacific sturgeon, scraping away a yellow adipose layer that looked like chicken fat. “Atlantic sturgeon is a protected species,” he said. “This fish was caught in the Columbia River, in Washington. It’s called a bullet because of the shape. Actually, they’re always a little dirty. But this is one of my personal favorites. Really fatty, like eating a piece of pork.”

From time to time, I would prompt him with fish names and he would respond with an off-the-cuff Pasternackian taxonomy.

Flounder: “The quintessential Long Island fish. In New England, they’ve got scrod. Maine, they’ve got haddock. Long Island, it’s flounder. I was born to flounder fish. I fished for them in Jamaica Bay, South Bay, Hewlett Harbor, under the Meadowbrook Bridge, Island Park, East Rockaway. It was a really abundant fish. But the flounder haven’t coöperated in the last couple of years.”

Cod: “Cod is God. The Spaniards came here in search of cod. Italians, the same thing. It’s a great, versatile fish. Unfortunately, none of them seem to make that right turn at Montauk anymore.”

Porgy: “Ghetto fish. It’s a fish that’s usually associated with minorities. A great fish. But not considered your mainstream white-bread fish. I grill it. Sweet meat. Phenomenal skin.”

Hake: “In the cod family but sweeter, softer in texture than cod, not as rich; half the price of cod. I like it roasted, because it can get really caramelized on the outside without doing anything. It’s just got a lot of natural sugars.”

Bluefish: “Godzilla. The other quintessential Long Island fish. Pound for pound, the hardest-fighting fish there is. Ferocious, eats anything, bites anything that gets in its way. Powerful, elusive. You could stick a beer can on a hook with bait inside and the fish’ll bite the beer can.”

Pasternack’s first restaurant job was more turf than surf. At fourteen, he bused tables in a Rockville Centre steak house whose charms included the bookies who hung out at the bar and the pictures of photo finishes that hung on the walls. Not until his mid-twenties, while cooking at La Reserve, an old-school French place near Rockefeller Center, did he commit to the notion that this was what he would do with his life. By then, he’d gone to college for a year; spent a winter cooking in Vermont and a couple of years at Provence, in Greenwich Village; earned a diploma from Johnson & Wales; and worked in a hotel kitchen in Dallas long enough (less than a week) to recognize that he belonged back in New York. He left La Reserve after three years, following the death of André Gaillard, the French-Vietnamese chef who had hired him, and for the next five years stayed in motion as a line cook or sous-chef in a number of busy, trendy restaurants: Bouley, Steak Frites, Prix Fixe, and Sam’s (where he met Donna Peltz, who was tending bar). He was in his early thirties and feeling that he was spinning his wheels when Terrance Brennan, a former sous-chef at Le Cirque who had also been at Prix Fixe, asked him to come to Picholine, a year-old bistro near Lincoln Center. Brennan had a clear idea of what he wanted Picholine to be and the good sense to give Pasternack plenty of latitude. When Ruth Reichl, in a 1996 review in the Times, awarded the restaurant three stars, it was understood that Pasternack, the chef de cuisine, deserved much of the credit. One of his signature dishes was seared sturgeon with caviar sauce; the fish was served with a reduction of shallots, white wine, champagne vinegar, tarragon, and peppercorns whisked with a beurre blanc, to which malossol caviar was added at the last moment. Typical of Pasternack’s cooking style at Picholine, it was labor-intensive (that is, French) in a way that his style at Esca is decidedly not.

While at Prix Fixe, he’d become friendly with Susan Cahn, whose family owned Coach Farms, and who often worked at their goat-cheese stand in the Union Square farmers’ market. Through her, he met her husband-to-be, Mario Batali, who was then merely a robustly talented chef, not yet a food-culture demigod and conglomerateur. Batali and his partner Joe Bastianich, who between them had interests in five Manhattan restaurants (this was 1999; they’re now up to ten), dined frequently at Picholine. They could see that Pasternack was crazy about fish yet otherwise demonstrably sane, and, conveniently, they had an available location, Fricco Bar, an underperforming trattoria on Forty-third Street west of Ninth Avenue.

“Joe and Mario kept coming into Picholine and saying, ‘Come on, let’s do something,’ “ Pasternack recalled. “They asked me what I wanted to do. I said a seafood restaurant, Provençal style. I wanted to call it Rascasse. That’s the name of a very important fish in the whole Mediterranean culture. Bony, spiny, gnarly, a basic ingredient in bouillabaisse, zuppa di pesce, fritto misto. Joe said, ‘Can you make it Italian?’ I said, ‘A good cook is a good cook. I can do it Chinese if you need to.’ He said, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ “

That fall, Pasternack accompanied Batali and Bastianich on a ten-day excursion to Italy. Starting out in Venice, they ate and drank their way up the Adriatic coast, toward Trieste and Istria, in northern Croatia. (On a subsequent trip, Batali and Pasternack and Simon Dean, who became a manager of and partner in Esca, spent a week in Amalfi, Sorrento, and Naples.) “We met my buddies who were fishmongers and restaurateurs,” Bastianich, who owns vineyards in Friuli and Tuscany and is the co-author of a book on Italian regional wines, told me. “We found out that everyone was eating raw fish. We had thought we were going to come back with ideas along the lines of what you would consider classic Venetian-style food—risottos and brodetto di pesce. Crudo was a revelation.”

They tasted, among other things, raw scampi, orata, branzino, lobster, scallops, and sole—briny, sweet, chewy, buttery, and enhanced only by lemon, olive oil, and sea salt. Immediately, they knew that the Esca kitchen would become a testing laboratory for crudo—a term that Bastianich more or less coined. (The word crudo means “uncooked,” but when it appears on a menu in Italy it typically refers to prosciutto.)

“Joe conceptualized the idea behind our crudo selections,” Batali told me. “And Dave’s taken the ball and run around the bases several times with it. A month before we opened, we were in the kitchen, trying this and that. Dave did a crudo that was a giant sea scallop with tangerine oil, pink peppercorns, and some Sicilian sea salt. And it was a giant moment. It was: Holy shit, this is gonna be a great restaurant.”

This is, perhaps, benignly revisionist history. According to Pasternack, none of them had quite foreseen that crudo would become the hallmark of Esca, or anticipated that the restaurant would generate such instant enthusiasm. “The crudo appetizers at Esca are the freshest, most exciting thing to happen to Italian food in recent memory,” William Grimes wrote in the Times. Nor could Pasternack have predicted that his handiwork would inspire so much mimicry. “Imitated by many, copied by few,” he likes to say about the post-Esca proliferation of crudo, which has become appetizer fare in such unlikely locales as Cleveland, Denver, and St. Louis.

Each day, Esca offers a dozen or so wallet-lightening crudo options. Thirty dollars, for instance, will bankroll a tasting selection that amounts to two bites each of, say, pink snapper with black lava sea salt, weakfish with a thin sliver of preserved blood-orange rind, opah with baby fennel and wild-fennel pollen, yellowtail with Gaeta-olive aioli, kingfish with pickled fiddlehead, and fluke with sea beans and radish. “Raw fish makes a statement about quality,” Pasternack told me. “People don’t eat raw fish at just any restaurant.” And he draws a firm distinction between crudo and ordinary American sushi and sashimi. “I always liked sushi—and I lived above a sushi place for four years—but I thought it always tasted the same. Place A was the same as Place B as Place C.”

One night last spring, I observed Pasternack adroitly handling a crudo crisis that materialized as he was preparing a guest-chef banquet at the James Beard House, in Greenwich Village. (In 2004, the James Beard Foundation honored him as the New York chef of the year.) Pasternack and his crew had come expecting to serve dinner to seventy-two, but, at the last minute, the Beard House staff had allowed an extra table of eight. Not counting the oysters that were served before everyone was seated, the menu included two crudo courses. The first of these consisted of two morsels of black sea bass garnished with lemon juice, sea salt, pepper, and a sprig of salad burnet, a green that looks like parsley and tastes like cucumber. The bass had been cut by Pasternack that morning, and now eighty plates were lined up in the kitchen—eight of them empty. A loaves-and-fishes moment, of sorts. Somehow he discerned sixteen pieces of bass that could be halved, a sleight-of-knife executed so that no one in the dining room would notice. As he drizzled olive oil over each portion, he said, “How was that for creative management?” A faint smile. “They’ll go home. They just won’t necessarily go home full.”

“For a lot of American chefs, it’s hard to understand how simple things are in Italy,” Batali said. “That was our idea, both with the crudo and with how Esca presents fish in general. It’s all in the ingredients. When Dave talks about the difference between the fluke in Sheepshead Bay and the fluke from some other part of Long Island, you know that in fact one does taste different from the other. Dave has a real understanding of what the Italians call materia prima—the raw ingredients—and making them available for the palate to explore.”

It hasn’t proved to be a professional or interpersonal liability that Pasternack’s instinctive Italian sensibility doesn’t extend to actually speaking the language (though he possesses a sizable vocabulary of kitchen nouns and adjectives). One of the waitresses at the Beard House addressed him in Italian throughout the evening; he would occasionally nod, and nothing was apparently lost in translation. In the area of Long Island where he grew up there is a great deal of cultural overlap between Italian-Americans and Jews. For whatever reason—and probably not merely because in the twenty-eight years since his bar mitzvah he has consumed immeasurable quantities of pork and shellfish—his diction, body language, and general affinities make him come across like a bit player in “GoodFellas,” so much so that he’s occasionally prone to identity confusion. A few years ago, for an appearance with Bryant Gumbel on “The Early Show,” he prepared a crudo that consisted of ivory salmon, fresh soybeans, lemon juice, sea salt, and olive oil. Gumbel asked, “How important is it what kind of oil you use on these fish?”

“Oil is essential,” Pasternack replied. “When we talk about oil, we talk only about extra-virgin olive oil. Because it’s like the Japanese put the soy sauce, us Italians, we put the olive oil.”

When he got home, his father, who had been watching, called and said, “What’s with this ‘us Italians’ business? We’re Jewish. Remember?”

A spring weekday, shortly after noon. In the Esca dining room—pale-yellow walls; brown leather banquettes; brass Art Deco sconces; a floor-to-ceiling expanse of Italian wines along one wall; a cherry-blossom arrangement that would shame a Christmas tree; otherwise, no dazzle and pleasantly little noise—orders are discreetly punched into a computer. Moments later, they emerge from a small printer on the kitchen counter where Pasternack works his way through a pile of striped bass while orchestrating the lunch flow. “Four times,” he informs Pablo Martínez, at the garde-manger station—meaning that a party of four have placed their orders and are now ready for their amuse-gueules, a plate of grilled bruschetta topped with a mélange of cannelloni beans, smoked mackerel, olive oil, red onions, and parsley. As the first-course dishes leave the kitchen, he glances at a clock, scrawls the time on the printout, and clips it to a shelf at eye level. At the appropriate moment, he will cue his crew—Sarah Ochs, the sous-chef; Katie O’Donnell, the sauté cook; Mike Sneed, at the pasta station—to mobilize the entrées.

“Pablo, you got two asparagus, two caprese, and a mindora. You got a third caprese gonna go with the oysters and you got a fourth caprese gonna go with another asparagus. . . . Give me a chicken, got an octo, I got skate with a cod. I got a snapper with an octo, I got branzino. . . . We got two stripers, a cod, a snapper, an orata, and a fett”—fettuccine. “I got two times. . . . Two, two. Misto, order branzino, order snapper, a cod, make sure you got a branzino ahead of a cod, you got a cod, two stripers, snapper, and then an orata. . . . Double octo, and make ’em look soigné, Sarah. Put up a cod in a minute. You got another big branzino, you got a pimente. Mike, order two fetts. . . . All right, Pablo, you’re gonna give me two asparagus, two caprese, and a spigola. Katie, you got asparagus and a caprese. Mike, you got the fett, it goes with the caprese. . . . Two two three three two. . . . Order three stripers and a porgy, another asparagus with arugula, another asparagus with a mista. . . . All right, Mike, spaghetti pimente. You got another spaghetti following the second branzino. You got a spaghetti with an orata. You got a spigola, snapper, skate, and an orata. . . .”

The temperature literally rises, but the atmosphere remains coolly businesslike. When Simon Dean, the Esca manager, wanders in holding an envelope and a magazine and says, “Dave, here’s a piece of what looks like hate mail. Also, here’s your copy of the latest issue of Private Air Magazine: Life at the Speed of Luxury,” Pasternack replies, “It’s a little hard right now to be funny. I’d love to, but . . .” In fact, his mood is sanguine. A very nice piece of fish arrived that morning, a crimson shoulder cut from a seven-hundred-pound bluefin tuna—by way of Rod Mitchell, in Portland. “There’s a lot of competition for these fish,” he says. “I don’t want to say I’m at the bottom of the pecking order. But I’m near the bottom. Plenty of people will pay a lot more than I will.” At eighteen dollars a pound, the bluefin is too expensive to grill or sauté, so half of it will become crudo. The other half will go to Bistro du Vent, a calculatedly jointlike joint just around the corner, on Forty-second Street, that Pasternack and his Esca partners opened last January. There it will also be served raw, an appetizer à la steak tartare.

Four crudo plates are ready to be dispatched, but Pasternack first squirts a piece of bluefin with lemon juice, sprinkles it with pepper, sea salt, and olive oil, hands it to me, and declares, “This is the king of tuna, man. Think steak, filet mignon. This is what the Japanese’ll pay exuberant prices for.”

As it happens, he’s just returned from Japan himself—his first visit, the highlight of which was a daily perambulation through Tsukiji, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market (“like walking inside an aquarium”). He’d made the trip as the guest of Hiromi Go, an Esca regular.

“Hiromi’s a very popular Japanese singer,” he says. “He’s like Elvis Presley over there. He’s getting ready to record, like, his sixtieth album. He’s been coming here for years and I’m always saying to him, ‘When are you taking me to Tokyo?’ So his wife set it up. I cooked two dinners, one for twelve people and one for forty. The second was in a Shinto shrine. I ate quite a few things I’d never had before.”

Such as?

“Whale. It’s really only fresh in Scandinavia, Russia, and Japan. Very interesting. A tuna-y texture and a liver-y finish. You know, in Japan they raise horses in the style of Kobe beef—massage it, give it sake, beer, different grains and grasses, play music for it. So I did a crudo dish that was horse, whale, and fatty tuna all on the same plate. They all looked alike. The whale could have been the tuna and the tuna could have been the horse.”

A waiter comes in with the news that a customer has requested cocktail sauce to accompany what might best be described as an order of the original crudo—a half-dozen Peconic Bay oysters. Having just seen Pasternack gracing tidbits of abalone, weakfish, and opah with, respectively, gaila melon, crushed almonds, and olio verde, I expect him to take offense. Instead, he reaches into a knee-level cooler and removes a mixture of horseradish, fresh chiles, lemons, ketchup, capers, and olive oil. “It’s their money,” he says. “Give ’em what they want, they’ll come back.”

So that includes tartar sauce with the fritto misto?

“No. They ask for that, which I think happens maybe twice a year, we tell ’em we don’t have it.” He shrugs. “What’re they gonna do? Hey, we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”

I once asked Joe Bastianich, who enjoys sport-fishing for tuna, about his experiences on the water with Pasternack, and he said, “Dave’s fishing, that’s a little too blue-collar for me.” For his part, Pasternack, who seems constitutionally incapable of condescension, has said, “I don’t understand freshwater fishing. That’s too Zen for me, too proper. Saltwater fishing, you know, there’s a lot more blood and guts.” A few years ago, Pasternack was invited, along with some other New York chefs, to a culinary event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While there, he went fly-fishing on the Green River with Ed Artzt, a frequent Esca patron who was formerly the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. “It was my first time fly-fishing,” Pasternack said. “I was good, I was a natural. I was the only guy who actually caught anything. I caught a cutthroat. After I took it off the hook, I went to open the cooler and everybody on the boat kind of looked at me like, What are you doing? I’m like, ‘Dinner.’ They go, ‘No, everything here’s catch-and-release.’ I said, ‘I spent the whole day to catch this one fish and we’re gonna throw it back?’ “

My recollection of my first fishing outing with Pasternack, though it took place fairly recently, is somewhat spotty. We were aboard a commercial boat called the Sorry Charlie, about three miles from Point Lookout, Long Island. As the tide was running out, a brisk wind was blowing in, which meant that conditions were, by my standards, insufficiently calm. I spent part of the morning in the cabin, seated atop a cooler, resting my head against a wall, wondering when the Dramamine was going to kick in, and smiling weakly when my shipmates periodically impugned my manhood. The captain, Mike Wasserman, struggled nobly to stay anchored over an old shipwreck that was a reliablegathering spot for black sea bass. He succeeded well enough for the group—five of us were fishing—to land about twenty-five keepers and store them in the live well. “The Rolls-Royce of fish,” Pasternack, who caught the most, said. “Steamed, fried, poached, baked, sautéed, grilled—I’ll take a black sea bass any day over a piece of tuna.” In the afternoon, we moved close to the shore and, using clams for bait, hauled in dozens of stripers that had been trailing a clam dredger as it repeatedly plowed a half-mile stretch parallel to Rockaway Beach. At the end of the trip, Pasternack bought everything in the live well and the coolers, plus Wasserman’s catch from the previous day: a hundred or so bass, and three conger eels that were headed for the zuppa di pesce.

The next time I went to sea was a sultry July day, when Pasternack was in quest of bluefish with his friend, piscatorial mentor, and supplier Artie Hoernig, the captain of Smokey III, a thirty-one-foot Down East-type cabin cruiser that he docks in Island Park. We met at 7 a.m. in the parking lot of Artie’s South Shore Fish Market, where we were joined by Pete Hession, a retired U.P.S. driver. Hoernig, who is in his late fifties, has a mahogany tan, a neatly trimmed silver beard, bloodshot blue eyes, and an inexhaustible supply of fish stories. The date, he announced, happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of one of his most gratifying adventures, the landing of a seven-hundred-and-eighty-two-pound mako shark. That same year, Pasternack, then in his mid-twenties, caught a three-hundred-pound bull shark near Key West. He had the head mounted, and it hung in his bedroom until a couple of years ago, when his wife told him, “Either the garage or you give it away.” It now occupies wall space at Artie’s market, right next to the head of the mako.

Hoernig went inside and returned with the day’s bait, twenty pounds of fresh and thirty pounds of frozen bunker, two flats of frozen spearing that would be used as chum, and ten pounds of frozen squid. A half hour later, this cargo got loaded onto the boat, along with three large coolers filled with crushed ice, and by nine o’clock we’d reached our destination, an area five miles offshore where Hoernig had planted about forty-five lobster pots.

The ocean surface was oddly placid. Hoernig: “It’s like a fucking lake.”

Hession: “I hope we see a breeze.”

Pasternack: “The only breeze we’re gonna see out here, Pete, is thunderstorms.”

Using bait-casting reels with forty-pound-test wire leaders and heavy-test monofilament backing, we tossed treble hooks baited with thick chunks of bunker into water about sixty feet deep. From the get-go, the bluefish were excitable. Pasternack quickly landed a seven-pounder, I caught one, Pasternack caught another. Then things got quiet for about fifteen minutes. “One, two, three, and that’s it?” Hoernig said. “Probably a fucking mako’s down there chasing these bastards.”

When they resumed biting, Hoernig would say, “Davey’s in!” or Hession would say, “Oh, Artie’s in!” Then: “Pete’s in!” Bluefish have notoriously sharp teeth and strong jaws, and the most prudent way to get one into a boat is with a gaff. As promised, there was ample gore—bluefish blood and bunker guts. At times, we had three fish on the line simultaneously. By eleven o’clock, we’d filled one cooler. A half hour later, Hoernig switched to an ultra-light spinning rod and tied on a bucktail jig baited with a piece of squid, rigged for what’s referred to on the South Shore as “fluking.” He soon landed a two-and-a-half-pounder, and Pasternack, in a competitive spirit, got busy fluking, too. Occasionally, someone would lower a white plastic bucket over the side and fill it with water for washing our bloody hands. As the midday sun poured down, Pasternack and Hoernig took to cupping handfuls and dousing their heads. “I’m getting fucking ready to jump in, man,” Pasternack said. It was not yet one o’clock when the second cooler reached capacity—mostly blues, a few fluke, a sea bass. Time to go pull lobster pots.

Citing my journalistic priorities, I managed to steer clear of the heavy lifting. As Hoernig eased the boat alongside a buoy, Pasternack would use a gaff to grab the submerged rope, and Hession would wrap a couple of turns around a small electric winch attached to the starboard gunwale. Invariably, the ropes were coated with algae the consistency of sodden shredded wheat and the lobster traps were encrusted with tiny mussels the size of split peas. The first few pots contained little Jonah and calico crabs and conch, and porgies flapping like birds, but were lobster-free. “No wonder your lobster’s so expensive,” Pasternack said.

“A labor of love,” he said to me as he tossed clumps of algae overboard and prepared to dump putrescent bunker carcasses from the mesh bait bag inside a trap. Pasternack wore a plain white T-shirt, loose-fitting gray athletic shorts, white crew socks, calf-length white rubber boots, and an F.D.N.Y. Rescue cap. Varieties of fish flesh were pasted to his clothing, but he didn’t appear to mind, unlike Hession, who concluded that the best way to clean the filth from his bluejeans was to tie them to a fishing line and drag them behind the boat. Which seemed like a clever idea until the line snapped, stranding him in his green plaid boxers. (“All I can say, Pete, is you’re a victim of circumstance,” Hoernig told him.)

Some squid eggs—transparent Gummi-worm-like masses—clung to one of the traps. I asked Pasternack whether he’d ever eaten them.He said that he hadn’t, but that he’d tasted octopus eggs in Italy. Almost defensively, he added, “I ate bunker. I got Artie to eat it, too. Little ones. They fried ’em in his restaurant. We called ’em Hewlett Bay anchovies. The sardines of Long Island. It was good, right, Artie? People squirted lemon juice on ’em.” He leaned over with the squid eggs, handed them to me, and said, “Here, put this in the cooler.”

They hoisted twenty-two traps, good for twenty-one lobsters. As Pasternack relaunched traps by sliding them down a plank and off the rear of the boat, he whistled “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

“You like blue-fishing?” he asked me as we headed back.

Yes, I did.

He leaned against the gunwale. In the background: Atlantic Beach and the high-rises of the Rockaways. The sun was in his face, he was bloody and sweaty and due for a shave. Lunch had been a turkey-and-cheddar sub, and there were dabs of mayo at the corners of his mouth. “I told you, I don’t always catch the biggest one, but I’m always catching ’em,” he said. “Some guys are only about catching big fish. I’ve always been for quantity. I like to eat ’em. I’m a meat-and-potatoes guy.”

I asked what he would do with the bluefish at Esca.

Palms up, he shook his head. “There’s lots of good stuff to work with now,” he said. “Lobster mushrooms. Great corn. Good tomatoes are starting to show up. This time of year it’s easy to be a cook.” Today, though, he’d been fishing and truly hadn’t given it a thought. But tomorrow, back in the kitchen, he’d have an idea. ♦

Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”